Times & Sunday Times paid online subscribers increased by 29,000 in 5 months

"The Times and The Sunday Times had 79,000 monthly digital subscribers at the end of February - up 29,000 over the previous five months.
The figures, released by the publications' owner News International, are closely watched to see if the 'paywall' model is making progress.
There were 228,000 joint print/digital and digital-only subscribers to The Times and Sunday Times.
Chief executive Rebekah Brooks said she was "delighted" with the figures.
The company said the total number of people paying to read The Times - print or digital - had increased by 3%."
Source:  BBC News, 29th March 2011

An estimated 1 billion TV viewers watched India play Pakistan in the Semi Final of the Cricket World Cup

"It’s estimated that a television audience of more than a billion people watched India play Pakistan in the semi-final of the world cup of cricket. To put that in perspective, around 0.7 billion people tuned in for the final of the last football world cup in South Africa.
At stake, in sporting terms, was the chance to contest the world cup final against regional neighbours Sri Lanka. India won as it happens, by 29 runs for those who understand cricket. But even for those who don’t have the slightest idea what the sport is, the match is still of great significance.
This is the first time either country has hosted the other in a cricket match since the Mumbai attacks perpetrated by Pakistani-based militants. Relations between India and Pakistan, tense at the best of times, have been at a new low ever since."

Source:  EuroNews, 30th March 2011
Note - No source quoted for where the estimates actually come from

52% of Chinese mobile internet users use mobile banking

"According to the "2011 China Mobile Banking Industry User Survey" recently issued in Beijing by Chinese mobile internet portal 3G.cn, as of February 2011, mobile banking reached a penetration rate of 52.2% among Chinese mobile internet users, compared to 36.8% in July 2010. The report also shows that the industry is making inroads amongst the middle-age demographic, and users' personal monthly income level continues to rise."
Source:  Marbridge Daily, 30th March 2011

The Cheezeburger network bought Know Your Meme for 'a seven figure sum'

"In a deal that combines some of the Internet’s most loved memes with the definitive site chronicling them, the Cheezburger Network has acquired Rocketboom’s Know Your Meme. The acquisition, first reported by Tubefilter and confirmed by Rocketboom and Cheezburger, was reportedly valued in the low seven digits — though neither party would publicly comment on the price.
Know Your Meme was created in 2007 as a complement to videos Rocketboom was creating at the time. The site included a wiki designed to curate all the memes that were hitting the Internet, as well as a blog to chronicle all the latest meme news. But the most famous part of the project was probably the long-running Know Your Meme web show, which provided easy-to-understand video companions to many of the Internet’s most (in)famous memes."

Source:  GigaOM, 28th March 2011

The internet accounts for 25% of all advertising in the UK

"UK online advertising has bucked the recession with strong growth of 12.8% on a like-for-like basis in 2010 to reach a new milestone of £4,097 million, according to the bi-annual advertising spend study from the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PwC.
With total UK advertising spend in 2010 valued at £16.6 billion, this takes the internet’s market share to a record high of 25% (23% in 2009), meaning that £1 in every £4 invested by advertisers is spent online.
These findings demonstrate that, despite the recession, online advertising is in rude health. Significantly, marketers are increasingly using online channels to drive their brand building campaigns. Consumer goods and retail advertisers increased their investment in online to become two of the top four big spenders in display, capitalising on the medium’s core strengths of reach and engagement as well as accountability.
In 2010 the biggest gain was display advertising, thanks to a nearly 200% surge in display advertising in a social media environment (on a like-for-like basis)* and 91% year-on-year (absolute growth) in video formats. Expenditure on pre-, mid- and post-roll video advertising nearly doubled to £54 million (£28 million in 2009). Overall display grew by more than a quarter (27.5%) on a like-for-like basis to a new high of £945.1 million, representing 23% of total online spend (up from 20% in 2009).
Consumer goods manufacturers became a top three display spender in the first half of 2010 with 12% share, jumping to 13% in the second half. The top spender in online display is finance with 15.2% share, indicating that as the economy recovers, finance brands are seeing their marketing budgets re-emerge. Finance market share has overtaken entertainment and media, which has dipped slightly to a 14% market share.
Paid-search continues to perform strongly with growth of 8% year-on-year on a like-for-like basis to £2,346 million, representing 57% of total online spend (61% in 2009).
Despite pressure on the housing, recruitment and automotive markets, online classified advertising bounced back in 2010 recording 9.7% growth on a like-for-like basis to £751 million – a share of 18% (19% in 2009).
Mobile advertising has experienced a staggering 116% year on year growth (on a like for like basis), up from 32% in 2009. Advertisers spent £83 million on mobile advertising in 2010, led by the entertainment and media sector, but with encouraging growth from finance, telecoms and consumer goods advertising."
Source:  Data from IAB / PwC, reported on the IAB UK website, 29th March 2011

Debenhams' iPhone app generated more than £1m in sales in the first five months

"Debenhams launched its iPhone app in October last year, but this week added Android and Nokia versions, which it says makes it the first high-street retailer to have an app presence on all three platforms.
That first iPhone app generated more than £1m of sales in its first five months, according to the retailer. 110,000 people have used the app more than five times – a better metric of active usage than pure download stats – with more than 2.4 million "shopping sessions"."

Source:  The Guardian, 23ed March, 2011

Apple accounts for nearly 85% of digital indie music revenues

"Perhaps that was totally obvious, though Apple makes up nearly 85 percent of digital indie revenue, worldwide, and that includes aggregated downloads, subscription, and streaming sources.  And, it also leaves both Amazon and Spotify with paltry shares of roughly 5-6 percent each."
Source:  Music trade group AIM, reported by DigitalMusicNews, 28th March 2011

Global recorded music sales fell by almost $1.5bn in 2010

"Global recorded music sales fell by almost $1.5bn (£930m) last year as digital piracy continued to take its toll on the industry, with the UK losing its mantle as the third-largest music market after "physical" sales of CDs collapsed by almost a fifth.
Global recorded music revenues fell 8.4% last year, about $1.45bn, to $15.9bn according to the annual Recording Industry in Numbers report by international music industry body the IFPI.
Overall physical sales, the term used in the industry for sales of products such as CDs, fell by 14.2% year on year to $10.4bn.
Digital revenues grew by 5.3% year on year to $4.6bn to account for 29% of all recorded music revenues. However, the rate of digital revenue growth has halved year on year as the industry continues to struggle with piracy and winning consumers over to legal download models.
The world's two largest markets, the US and Japan, took a hammering last year accounting for 57% of the total global decline in trade revenues. In 2009 the two countries accounted for 80% of the global decline.
In the US overall sales fell by 10% with physical sales down 20% to just over $2bn and digital sales stagnating with 1.2% growth to $2bn. Japan saw an overall market decline of 8.3% with the report noting that "rapidly rising online is threatening the development of the digital market"."
Source:  Data from IFPI, reported by The Guardian, 28th March 2011

50% of tweets with links are generated by just 20,000 twitter users

"We study several longstanding questions in media communications research, in the context of the microblogging service Twitter, regarding the production, flow, and consumption of information. To do so, we exploit a recently introduced feature of Twitter---known as Twitter lists---to distinguish between elite users, by which we mean specifically celebrities, bloggers, and representatives of media outlets and other formal organizations, and ordinary users. Based on this classification, we find a striking concentration of attention on Twitter---roughly 50% of tweets consumed are generated by just 20K elite users---where the media produces the most information, but celebrities are the most followed."
Source:  Shaomei Wu, Cornell University, Jake M. Hofman, Yahoo! Research, Winter A. Mason, Yahoo! Research, Duncan J. Watts, Yahoo! Research, 'Twitter Flow' 28th March 2011
(Includes a link to download the full research report)
Note 1 - Why just just looked at tweets with links (& in fact just tweets with B.t.ly Urls:
From the full pdf:
"In addition to the follower graph, we are interested in the content being shared on Twitter|particularly URLs|and so we examined the corpus of all 5B tweets generated over a 223 day period from July 28, 2009 to March 8, 2010 using data from the Twitter \ rehose," the complete stream of all tweets2. Because our objective is to understand the flow of information, it is useful for us to restrict attention to tweets containing URLs, for two reasons. First, URLs add easily identi able tags to individual tweets, allowing us to observe when a particular piece of content is either retweeted or subsequently reintroduced by another user. And second, because URLs point to online content outside of Twitter, they provide a much richer source of variation than is possible in the typical 140 character tweet. Finally, we note that almost all URLs broadcast on Twitter have been shortened using one of a number of URL shorteners, of which the most popular is http://bit.ly/. From the total of 5B tweets recorded during our observation period, therefore, we focus our attention on the subset of 260M containing bit.ly URLs."

Note 2 - According to the authors of the report, in an email to me in response to my queries, 'attention' is actually defined as being potentially exposed to tweets.  So if I follow @aplusk I am paying attention to his tweets.  It's a bit of a shame that they've used this very low measure of involvement, rather than to look at clicks, re-tweets or replies, in my opinion
So in fact the title should say "50% of the potential impressions generated by tweets with links are generated by just 20,000 users"

TV accounts for 47% of the time American children spend with media

"Television use dwarfs internet use in both the number of children who surf the web and the amount of time they spend on it. The analysis found that during the week, most children spend at least three hours a day watching television, and that television use among preschoolers is the highest it has been in the past eight years. Of the time that children spend on all types of media, television accounts for a whopping 47%.
Heavy television viewing may even be partially responsible for the rising number of children who use the Internet. Parents in one study indicated that more than 60% of children under age three watch video online. That percentage decreases as children get older (the report suggests this is because school-age children have less time at home), but even 8- to 18-year-old children reported in another study that they consume about 20% of their video content online, on cellphones, or on other portable devices like iPods."
Source:  Data from Joan Ganz Cooney Center and Sesame Workshop, reported by Mashable, 14th March 2011

O2 was the top online ad spender in the UK in 2010

"According to figures compiled exclusively for Marketing by Nielsen, mobile services provider O2 was the biggest online display advertiser in the UK, despite reducing its budget by almost 30% year on year to £9.9m.
Although the figures do not include spend on keyword search or social media, they suggest that major FMCG firms still allocate only a small proportion of their budgets to paid-for online advertising.
Procter & Gamble, the UK's biggest advertiser, devotes just 1.3% of its spend to paid-for online display ads, while Unilever invests £2.6m, just 1.9% of its total media spend.
The COI posted the biggest year-on-year fall in the top 10, slashing its spend by 52% year on year to £4.6m. Conversely, Google increased its investment by 175% to £4m, dedicating 61% of its total media spend to online display ads."
Source:  Data from Nielsen and Marketing Magazine, reported by Marketing Magazine, 22nd March 2011
Note:  As the figures don't include search (which is about 70% of all UK online ad spend), they should be treated with caution.

American online video viewing time rose 45% per viewer Y-o-Y in January 2011

"According to a recent release by Nielsen, online video usage in the U.S. is up considerably from the same time last year, as time spent viewing video on PC/Mac/laptops from home and work locations increased by 45%. Although the number of unique online video viewers only increased by 3.1% from last January, level of activity was up as viewers streamed 28% more video and spent 45% more time watching. Total video streams also saw significant year-over-year growth, up 31.5% to 14.5 billion streams."

Source:  Data from Nielsen, reported by MediaPost, 17th March 2011